rukus !
A collaboration between rukus! Federation and The Horse Hospital: The Place in Which We Stand
‘Black Perverts Network’ invite card , 1997
LMA/4571/06/02/07/002
In celebration of the radical spirit and pioneering achievements of the rukus! Archive, The Horse Hospital is embarking on a curatorial collaboration with rukus! Federation in launching a retrospective digital exhibition centering the Black UK LGBTQ community and exploring what the rukus! Archive might become.
No archive arises out of thin air. Each archive has a 'pre-history', in the sense of prior conditions of existence. We need to pay particular tribute to all those who have been involved over the years, often in very informal, personally taxing and under-funded ways, to secure in one place slides of the works, catalogues, exhibition notices, reviews and other texts relating to the artistic production of the black and Asian diaspora, without whom this moment of archival retrieval would not exist. " — Stuart Hall, Constituting an Archive
Over the coming months we are facilitating an opportunity for conversation and intergenerational exchange, holding space for a new generation of Black LGBTQ artists working today. As the programme of digital works develops, artists' conversations and interventions will showcase the work of UK Black LGBTQ trailblazers while also expanding the rukus! Archive collection. We are commissioning a number of short-form digital responses to specific items, people or feelings that the archive holds.
Our art organisation has recently started developing its archive collection of 27years+ of materials and ephemera generated in the running of the space and its playing host to countless community-led art exhibitions and events. As we have been delving into practices of community archives and the writing of histories from below, we are keen to collaborate with other diy archival initiatives, in order not only to share our skills and histories, but also in recognition of our mutual struggles, and in the hope that soon enough, survival might turn into a celebration of collective joy.
The rukus! Archive was founded in 2000 by photographer Ajamu X and filmmaker and theatre director Topher Campbell. It is the first archive in Europe dedicated to collecting, preserving and making available artistic, social and cultural histories related to the Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities in the United Kingdom. Its intellectual origins reside in the work of Stuart Hall and British Cultural Studies more generally, and the critical dialogue it establishes with both mainstream heritage practices and dominant Black and queer identity discourses. The archive covers a period between ca. 1976 - 2012 and is housed at the London Metropolitan Archives in Clerkenwell, London. The ruckus! Archive received the London Metropolitan Archives Landmark Archives Award in 2007.